The recent vicious outburst of predatory violence that paralyzed much
of England for four whole nights and days should have come as no great
surprise, given a generation of
teenagers and young adults who were reared in broken homes where, more
often than not, saying "No!" to impulse was neither exemplified nor
taught, a generation moreover that "waxed fat" in the culture of
a crib-to-coffin welfare state, where living by grace of state subsidy,
with little or no incentive to work, has come to be seen as a basic
right; where criminals, if and when actually apprehended, are all too
often marched from holding room to court room to a brief stay, if even
that, in detention, after which they are returned, smirking, to the
street; and, most importantly of all,
where a loving reverence for God and His Commandments, with the
certitude that we must each of us one day answer to His judgment, is
all but extinct. What has now so dramatically caught
the world's attention was sooner or later almost bound to take place. When in the hearts of men the fear of the
Lord no longer holds sway, the law of the jungle reigns.
"Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there
is the spirit of liberty" (II Corinthians 3:17). The converse is also
true. It was for this reason that our Founding Fathers insisted
that the Republic they had crafted
presupposed a God-fearing people, in the absence of which, the Republic
would not and could not survive.

Back in the soaring (Man on
the Moon) and searing (Watts
and Weathermen) sixties a
prophetic novel, A Clockwork Orange,
by Britain's Anthony Burgess, was famously transferred to the screen by
Stanley Kubrick, offering a horrifying vision of a future "Great"
Britain, with godless young thugs exulting in violence, making life
hell for the weak. What was envisioned there forty years ago has become
a present reality, in dramatic validation of Our Lord's solemn warning:
"Without Me you can do nothing."
And one is tempted to wonder: England today, America tomorrow? The
recent eruption of sadistic attacks by black youth gangs on helpless
civilians in San Francisco, in Denver, in Milwaukee, in Chicago, and in
the "City of Brotherly Love" (a.k.a. Philadelphia) is hardly
reassuring.

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May I share with you here a trenchant appraisal of the terror on
England's streets from the editorial page of the London Daily Telegraph for August
14, followed by a commentary from British novelist Theodore Dalrymple.

From an August 14 editorial in
the London Telegraph:

Over the past week we have
witnessed the CULMINATION of the liberal experiment. The experiment
attested that two parents don't matter; that welfare, rather than work, cures poverty; you tolerate "minor crime"; you turn a blind eye
to celebrity drug use; you
allow children to leave school without
worthwhile skills; you say there's no
difference between right and wrong. Well,
now we've seen the results.

The modem Labour Party's answer to every social question is to open the
taxpayers' cheque books. We've tested that world view to the point of
destruction. The welfare State has never been bigger but nor have our
social problems, Today's historically higher tax burden has forced
parents to spend more hours outside the home, just to make ends meet.

The Left is always ready to attack hyper-capitalism for the ways in
which it can erode community bonds, but it looks the other way when it
comes to thinking about the ways in which the hyper-state can devour social capital. Labour has become
the most materialist and consumerist of Britain's two largest parties.
Whereas Big Society Conservatives are immersed in the importance of relationship-building, within
families and within communities, it is the Left that constantly
emphasizes the right to personal
fulfillment.

It reveres "lifestyle choices" as though the kind of home in which a child is raised is
somehow equivalent to whether you get your weekly groceries from
Morrisons or Asda. Any political movement that is relaxed about the structure of the
family will produce the amoral
youths that rioted last week.

The youth of Britain have long
placed a de facto curfew on the old, who in most places would no more think of
venturing forth after dark then would peasants in Bran Stoker's
Transylvania. Indeed, well BEFORE the
riots last week, respectable persons would not venture out into the
centers of MOST British cities or towns on Friday and Saturday nights,
for fear - or even in the certainty - of encountering drunken and
aggressive youngsters. In Britain nowadays, the difference
between ordinary social life and riot is only a matter of degree, not of type.

A short time ago, I gave a talk in a school in an exquisite market
town, deep in the countryside. Came
Friday night, however, and the inhabitants locked themselves into their
houses against the invasion of the barbarians. In my own little market
town of Bridgnorth, in Shropshire, where not long ago a man was nearly
beaten to death 20 yards from my house, drunken young people often
rampage down one of its lovely little streets, causing much damage and
preventing sleep. No one, of course, dares ask them to stop. The
Shropshire council has dealt with the problem by granting a license for
a pub in the town to open until 4 a.m., as if what the town needed was
the opportunity for yet more and later drunkenness.

If the authorities show neither the will nor the capacity to deal with
such an easily solved problem - and willfully do all they can to worsen
it - is it any wonder that they exhibit, in the face of more difficult
problems, all the courage and determination of frightened rabbits?

The rioters in the news last
week had a thwarted sense of entitlement that had been assiduously
cultivated by an alliance of intellectuals, governments and
bureaucrats. "We're fed up with being broke," one rioter was reported
as having said, as if having enough money to satisfy one's
desires were a human right
rather than something to be earned.

"There are people here with nothing,"
this rioter continued: nothing, that is, except an education that has
cost $80,000, a roof over their head, clothes on their back and shoes
on their feet, food in their stomachs, a cellphone, a flat-screen TV, a
refrigerator, an electric stove, heating and lighting, hot and cold
running water, a guaranteed income,
free medical care, and all of the same for any children that
they might care to propagate.

But while the rioters have been
maintained in a condition of near-permanent unemployment by government
subvention augmented by criminal activity, Britain was importing labor to man its
service industries. You can travel up and down the country and
you can be sure that all the decent hotels and restaurants will be
manned overwhelmingly by young foreigners; not a young Briton in sight
(thank God).

The reason for this is clear; the young unemployed Britons not only
have the wrong attitude to
work, for example regarding fixed
hours as a form of oppression,
but they are also dramatically badly
educated. Within six months of arrival in the country, the average
young Pole speaks better, more cultivated English than they do.

The icing on the cake, as it were, is that the social charges on labor
and the minimum wage are so high that no employer can possibly extract
from the young unemployed Briton
anything like the value of what it costs to employ him. And thus we
have the paradox of high youth unemployment at the very same time that
we suck in young workers from abroad.
The culture in which the young unemployed have immersed themselves is
not one that is likely to promote virtues such as self-discipline,
honesty and diligence. Four lines from the most popular lyric of the late and
unlamentable Amy Winehouse should establish the point:

I
didn't get a lot in class But I know it don't come in a
shot glass They tried to make me go to
rehab But I said 'no, no, no'

This message is not quite the same as, for example, "Go to the ant,
thou sluggard, consider her ways and be wise."

Furthermore, all the young rioters will have had long experience of the prodigious efforts of the British
criminal justice system to confer
impunity upon law-breakers. First the police are far too busy
with their paperwork to catch the criminals; but if by some chance -
hardly more than one in 20 - they do catch them, the courts oblige by inflicting ludicrously
lenient sentences.

A single example will suffice,
but one among many. A woman got into an argument. with someone
in a supermarket. She called her boyfriend, a violent habitual
criminal, "to come and sort him out." The boyfriend was already on bail
on another charge and wore an electronic tag because of another
conviction. (Incidentally, research shows that a third of all crimes in
Scotland are committed by people on bail, and there is no reason
England should be any different.)

The boyfriend arrived in the
supermarket and struck a man a heavy blow to the head. He fell to the
ground and died of his head injury. When told that he had got
the "wrong" man, the assailant said he would have attacked the "right"
one had he not been restrained. He
was sentenced to serve not more than 30 months in prison. Since
punishments must be in proportion to the seriousness of the crime, a sentence like this exerts tremendous
downward pressure on sentences for lesser, but still serious, crimes.

So several things need to be done, among them the reform and even
dismantlement of the educational and social-security systems, the
liberalization of the labor laws, and the much firmer repression of
crime....

[Emphasis added].

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And good luck with that. John O' Connor, a former Scotland Yard
official recently opined on the BBC that whereas the American answer to
crime is that "they locked
people up", "we haven't got the heart for that over here."